If you’ve spent any amount of time on the Internet lately, you’ve probably heard of Jordan Peterson: a charismatic professor of psychology turned guru dad to the discontented young men of the western world. His meteoric rise has been swift, prompted by his refusal to use non binary pronouns, and he is now a figurehead of the anti-pc, anti-social-justice-warrior movement. The New York Times has described him as the most influential public intellectual of the western world.

Peterson is a complicated figure, and I’m not interested in reducing him to heroic, or villainous caricatures. His most recent book, 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos (which is also the most read book on Amazon right now) is, in places, genuinely helpful. 2 or 3 pieces of the advice he offers have been truly helpful to me, and I think his self authoring course has merits. Go an inch beneath his often obvious advice, though, and you run into some problems.

I normally don’t have an entire show dedicated to the critique of a public figure, but I think Jordan Peterson and his wild success need to be understood. I’ve been searching for some cogent criticism of Peterson, and Douglas Lain has offered some of the best critiques I’ve found on the web. In this episode of Sacred Tension Douglas and I discuss his offer to debate Peterson, Peterson’s flaws as a public intellectual, why Douglas describes himself as a “wannabe Marxist,” and much more.